About Quality Tools

Welcome to a new column on the tools of our trade! I hope
this first article will set the stage and whet your appetite for future
discussions.

What do we mean by 'tools'?

In beginning a column on tools, perhaps the first question
that must be asked, is 'What do we mean by tools, particularly in the context
of quality?' Quality tools may be described as, 'Structured activities that
contribute towards increasing or maintaining business quality'. Let's look
closer at this description:

'Structured activities' means doing things in a
repeatable way, using a defined set of rules.

'that contribute' means that they add value.

'increasing or maintaining' means that they can
be used for all areas of quality improvement, control and management.

'business quality' means that the company
benefits from their use.

Overall, this says that quality tools are serious and
valuable, and are not used simply because they are the 'latest sexy method'.

Tools may be used at the organisational level, structuring
the way people work together, or at the individual level, helping people and
groups to solve problems and do their jobs. In a list of organisational-level
tools, I would include such as Quality Circles, Quality Management Systems and
Business Process Engineering. Having said this, I do not, at least initially,
propose to cover tools in this arena. It is more at the individual level that
this column will focus.

Three areas to use tools

Broadly, individual tools are used to manage information in
three areas:

1. Collecting
various levels of numeric and non-numeric information.

2. Structuring
that information in order to understand aspects of processes and problems.

3. Using
the information to identify and select information and plan for specific
actions.

So what are the individual tools, and where do they come
from? There are several sources:

Seven tools and more...

The Japanese have collected (and even invented some of) two sets of seven tools,
although just to confuse us, there are conflicting views on what these are.
For example, some descriptions of the first seven tools include Flowcharts,
whilst others include Bar Charts or Line Graphs.

Work Study, a predecessor of modern quality, has given us tools for measuring our work,
for example the Flow Process Diagram and the String Diagram.

Specialised quality areas, such as reliability engineering, have give tools such as
FMEA.

There are a number of general management tools for planning and decision-making, such
as Gantt Charts and Decision Trees.

Computer programming has given us several tools for mapping out processes, the most
common being Flowcharts.

There are many other areas that yield useful tools, for example SWOT Analysis from
marketing.

The articles in the series will pick and dip into all of
these areas, sometimes exploring strange new tools and sometimes shedding new
light through old windows. Overall, I hope they will be of practical use to you
in your work. I will also endeavour to keep any mathematics to a minimum -
where sums appear, they will be carefully explained.

Finally, let's round up the column this month with a
relevant example of tool use: below is a Matrix Diagram taken from my
forthcoming book, used to relate a number of individual tools to the three
application areas described above.